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Hey All of Yez! In this week’s NIZE BABY, (5/26/1928) Morris gets a chiropractic treatment from two “experienced” chiropractors. Except they are really floor painters. Papa gets tied up like a pretzel. I love the “Banana Oil” topper, with “Ginsberg’s Seeds”. It’s nice to see the page in color, I only have two examples of the feature this way. This will be the last Nize Baby for awhile, I’m keeping one in reserve until later. Sorry about the shadow on this photo, the page was so big that I had a hard time getting even lighting on it.

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Krazy Kat from 12/4 to 12/9/1939 is really a “non-themed” week. My favorite strip in this batch is 12/8, with Krazy and the two worms. The scans of these aren’t as clear as usual, because this week of Kat strips proved especially rare and difficult to find.  Therefore, we takes what we can gets.

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In Marvelous Mike this time, from 7/15 to 7/20/1957, Cliff Crump introduces Mike to Bill Bell, the exhausted comic strip cartoonist. I love Bill’s reaction to meeting Mike in the 7/16 strip, “He’s like a character out of a comic strip!” Mike does word association on Bill and puts him to sleep, clearing the stage for Mike’s take-over of the “Madeline” strip. I wonder if the character of Bill Bell is a backhanded tribute to the Bell Syndicate, an independent distributor of comic strips in the mid Twentieth century. Maybe Kuwahara was trying to interest Bell in the Mike strip, United Features distribution of the feature was very low by this time.

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Felix the Cat this week, from 6/22 to 6/27/1936 (6/25 is missing), shows Messmer at his best, as Felix confronts the mysterious Swami.  Messmer is hard to beat at Gothic imagery, moody blacks, mysterious old houses and magic spells. Felix can now make himself disappear with the Swami’s magic wand, mystifying Snobbs the butler in the 6/27. I love the little marginal characters that pop on and off in the Felix strips, such as the dog peering around the corner of a building in the 6/24. 

Cathy and I have been out painting quite a lot lately, we spent a week painting in nearby Eagle Rock, Ca. The big rock that the town was named for, was actually in danger of being blasted out for condos. Our friend John Stillian formed CERB, the Committee for Eagle Rock Beautiful, and built a nature trail on the land surrounding the Eagle Rock, thus keeping the Rock from being torn down. The last two years, we plein air painters have gathered for a week in late Sept. to paint outdoor scenes in the town of Eagle Rock. We then sell, or try to sell them to patrons on the last weekend in the month. This year, the temperature climbed to 101 degrees on Saturday and then about the same on Sunday. Needless to say, it made the event most uncomfortable for everybody. One of the painters almost passed out from heat exhaustion, not from painting, but from standing around trying to sell her work to the few hardy souls who showed up. I managed to sell three of my watercolor paintings. It was pretty gratifying to have some total strangers buy my stuff for a change. This makes me feel that they really want the paintings because they like them, not because they are trying to please me. Of course, I don’t charge very high prices for them, either. On Thursday we managed to get all the way down to Laguna Beach and painted there for the afternoon. We were at a place called Heisler Park, near the beach. It’s a lovely spot, pink, lavender and burnt umber rocks define the edge of the land. We met a couple from Texas who almost bought a painting, but didn’t have enough cash on hand. They said they would write us later about the painting, but, it’s an impulse buy. See you again soon with more old comics.

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